IPS Blog

Trying to track—let alone make sense—of recent developments around Iran is enough to make one reach for that stuff they just found lots of in Afghanistan: lithium. While the element is essential for a host of electronics, it is also a standard treatment for bipolar behavior.

Take the issue of Iran’s missile force. The conservative International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London concluded that the threat the missiles pose to Israel, the U.S. or its allies has been vastly overstated. “While such attacks might trigger fear, the expected casualties would be low—probably less than a few hundred,” the study found. Iran’s Shehab-1 and 2 cannot even reach Israel, and it will be at least three years before the longer range Shahab-3B and Sejjil-2 are deployed. In any case, according to the study, the missiles are inaccurate.

But while the IISS was pooh-poohing the danger, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Europe was threatened by “hundreds” of Iranian missiles, although Iran doesn’t have a missile that can come close to hitting Europe. Gates was on Capitol Hill pumping the Obama administration’s new sea and land-based “ phased adaptive approach” to missile defense.

In the meantime, the U.S. was sending an aircraft carrier and almost a dozen support ships into the Red Sea. Rumor has it that the fleet will try to intercept Gaza aid ships organized by the Iranian Red Crescent Society. Several Israeli submarines are currently deployed in the Gulf of Iran as well, along with a newly arrived surface warship. While it seems extremely unlikely that the U.S. would actually try to halt the Iranian ships, U.S. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said, “ I don’t think that Iran’s intentions vis-à-vis Gaza are benign.”

The London Times reported that the Israelis and the Americans had come to an agreement with Saudi Arabia to allow Israeli warplanes to cross the desert kingdom without being challenged on their way to bomb nuclear sites in Iran. While Riyadh called the story “slanderous, the Times was holding to its sources in the Israeli and U.S. militaries. And Tzahi Hanegbi, chair of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said that “time was running out” for Iran.

As I said, people are talking very crazy these days in the Middle East.

If Israeli planes did decide to bomb targets in Iran, conventional thinking is they would hit enrichment facilities at Natanz and Qom, a gas storage unit at Isfahan and the heavy-water reactor at Arak. Planes might also target the light-water reactor at Bushehr. To do so, of course, would require crossing Jordanian and Saudi airspace, but there is very little either country could do about it. Challenging the Israelis in the air is a very bad idea.

Even with mid-flight refueling, it would be a stretch, but it would be hard to knock out Iranian targets using just their missile firing submarines. Unless, of course, the Israelis are willing to cross the Hiroshima-Nagasaki line and use nuclear warheads. It seems like madness, but then some people are talking pretty crazy these days.

In a recent Christian Science Monitor article, “Does Israel suffer from ‘Iranophobia’?”, reporter Scott Peterson examines the Israeli mindset and found some pretty scary things. “There’s something utterly irrational and exceedingly disproportionate in Israeli understandings of the Iranian threat,” says Haggai Ram, a professor at Ben Gurion University and author of “Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession.”

“Iran is perhaps the most central issue [in Israel], yet there is really no critical debate about this,” says Ram, and for those Israelis who do challenge the idea that Iran is an “existential threat” to Israel, “they are immediately rendered into these bizarre self-defeating, self-hating Jews, and seen as a fifth column.”

According to Ram, “For Israelis, anti-Iran is a consensus. You don’t have to be a neoconservative to wish for the destruction of Iran.” Polls show that Prime Minister Netanyahu is growing in popularity, and that Israelis are circling the wagons on everything from the attack on the Gaza flotilla to the embargo of Gaza Strip.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad has also said that one day “Israel will vanish,” but much of his bombast is for internal consumption and the need to divert people from the economic crisis at home. Netanyahu’s comparison of Ahmadinejad to Hitler, and of the current situation to 1939, serves much the same purpose. Focusing on Iran keeps the world’s eyes away from the ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands and the strangulation of Gaza.

How much of this is real is hard to sort out. The U.S. talks about Iran as a “threat,” even though Iran has neither the military nor the economic capabilities to inflict serious damage on Americans. Iran can also talk about Israel vanishing, but can do nothing to actually facilitate that. Even if Iran acquired a nuclear weapon, to use it would be national suicide, and the Iranians have never exhibited a desire for self-destruction.

The danger is that rhetoric and bombast can create its own reality and lead to a mistake. The Israeli attack on the Turkish ship was just that. When people with nuclear weapons talk in apocalyptic language, it’s something to pay attention to.

If a nuclear weapon is an evil fruit of the times we live in, its “pit” is like a dollop of brimstone ladled out by Satan with love from hell.

Didn’t know a nuclear weapon has a pit? First, it behooves us to note that the word “pit” has a number of definitions. In fact, even when applied to fruit — “a seed covered by a stony layer” — it’s of two faces like Janus. To humans, it’s waste material to be discarded, but from a tree’s point of view (on whatever level, such as cellular), it’s a means of ensuring the future of its species.

The nuclear-weapons industry adopted the word “pit” for the weapon’s core, which is power-packed with the varieties of uranium or plutonium isotopes capable of a warp-speed chain reaction. Yes, it’s a seed for the a chain reaction. But instead of ensuring anything or anyone’s continued existence, the pit instead serves as a cache for — drum roll, please — a seed of destruction.

Why have I brought up the subject of nuclear pits? A project for their production is pivotal to the Obama administration’s plans for nuclear modernization. In a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists piece titled Bunker mentality: Is NNSA digging itself into a hole at Los Alamos?, Greg Mello writes that “as part of the New START ratification package, the administration projects $16 billion in new warhead spending over this decade.” A beneficiary of the funding, if passed by Congress, would be Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, where — boring name alert — the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility for producing said pits would be built for a whopping $3.4 billion.

Mello writes that, at “270,000-square-foot” the new facility “would add only 22,500-square-feet of additional plutonium processing and lab space to [Los Alamos’s] existing 59,600-square-feet of comparable space.” It “works out to $151,000 per square foot, or $1,049 per square inch.” Holy (watch your tax dollars go up in) smoke!

“But why make pits at all?” Mello asks.

Aside from the many potent reasons to steadily diminish a reliance on nuclear weapons . . . there is already a surfeit of backup pits [which] will last for many decades to come. [Nor is there a] shortage of space to make pits, either at [Los Alamos] or nationwide. … Were [the new facility] in place, [it] would increase production capacity to an even more absurd level. … Every aspect of the . . . project, from the mission itself to the practicality of the building design, should be questioned far more deeply than Congress has done to date.

The Obama administration is making generous concessions to the nuclear industry presumably, as alluded to above, to win votes from Republicans on the new START treaty and other disarmament measures, however tepid. In fact, one can’t help but wonder if the administration and conservatives have committed themselves to cooperation (respectable speak for “conspiracy”) in finding ways to keep the “nuclear-industrial complex” humming along, if at a diminished velocity from its heyday in the fifties to eighties.

“Conservatives have declared a new class war, but it’s not on bankers earning seven-figure bonuses,” even though “[a] recent study [finds] that when such factors as education and work experience are accounted for, state and local employees earn 11 to 12 percent less than comparable private sector workers…By attacking public workers, they can demonize “big labor” and “big government” at the same time, while deflecting attention from the more logical target of Middle America’s rage: the irresponsible Wall Street traders, whose risky, high-profit business practices brought down the economy, and the lax regulators who let them get away with it.” (The Nation) If GOP senators are saying this, maybe they should volunteer to have their salaries cut first?

“It’s as if the Earth has been smoking two packs a day,” say the authors of a new Australian report on the decline of our oceans. (Scientific American)

The Guardian interviews Story of Stuff‘s Annie Leonard (with whom we collaborated on the Story of Cap and Trade) on her new book:”If you’re going to vote with your dollar that’s fine,” Leonard says. “But you need to remember that Exxon has a lot more dollars than you. We need to vote with our votes; re-engage with the political process and change the balance of power so that those who are looking out for the wellbeing of the planet dominate, instead of those who are just looking out for the bottom line.”

But if you think the situation in the Gulf is bad, take a look at the Niger Delta. By IPS board member Ethelbert Miller, in the FPIF Focal Points blog. You can also go to Niger Delta Rising for more background.

While our children go off to school, many Somali children are going off to war. 80 percent of the Somali rebel groups are comprised of children. The rebel groups, however, are not the only perpetrators. 20 percent of the Somali transitional government is made up of children, some as young as 9 years old.

These child soldiers, only occasionally paid $1.50 a day, sport fully loaded assault rifles as they roam the dilapidated streets of lawless Somalia. They are employed by the Somali army, almost entirely armed and financed by the United States. Some of the children have even claimed to have recently returned from training in Uganda, where U.S. military officers have been overseeing the training for Somali soldiers.

The U.S. funding going to training and arming child soldiers in Somalia, exemplifies the effects of AFRICOM. AFRICOM is an independent military command for Africa and represents an increased expansionism by the U.S. military.

One of AFRICOM’s chief functions is to train and equip African militaries such as the one in Somalia. According to the New York Times, when questioned about how the U.S. was ensuring that it’s funding was not going to support child soldiers in Somalia, a U.S. official responded, “I don’t have a good answer for that.”

Furthermore, AFRICOM’s efforts generally contribute to further destabilization and conflict, rather than peace. The New York Times also recorded former defense minister Sheik Yusuf Mohamed Siad saying, “All this international training, it’s just training soldiers for the Shabab [rebel group].” This conclusion stems from the increasing number of defections from the Somali army.

Despite the recent failures of AFRICOM in the Congo and Mauritania, President Obama increased its budget for fiscal year 2010.

Where do you want your tax dollars to go? To the Department of Defense to arm and train child soldiers and fuel aggression?

Or you could urge the U.S. government to give it to nonmilitary agencies that will help build schools and provide children in Somalia and the rest of Africa with the education necessary to end the cycle of conflict. Learn more about how to resist AFRICOM.

The U.S. is also not in the best position right now to pressure Somalia end the use of child soldiers. It is the only country, besides Somalia, to not have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty that prohibits the use of children under the age of 15 in armed conflict.

The U.S., as the world hegemon and the leading provider of humanitarian assistance to Somalia, could have immense sway in preventing their use of child soldiers. The U.S. failure to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, however, hurts its credibility to pressure Somalia.

While campaigning, President Obama agreed that our failure to ratify the Convention “is embarrassing”; however, we have still not seen a move made to rectify the situation.

The U.S. must be held more accountable. Action must be taken immediately both to ratify the Convention on the rights of the Child and to prevent U.S. funding of military conflicts in Africa. These steps cannot be delayed when children’s innocence is at stake.

Wednesday, according to the New York Times, the UN Security Council discussed the use of child soldiers and declared a “readiness” to adopt sanctions against those who participate in this practice. While this is a positive step, rhetoric is not enough; the U.S. should take a leadership role in enacting this change immediately.

Earlier today, Marc Lynch posted a piece entitled “A Good Deal For Gaza” in which he noted reports that the Israeli government is to “significantly ease the blockade of Gaza in exchange for American support for a whitewash of the investigation of the flotilla incident” and argued that “trading off the investigation for the blockade was the right move” for Gazans.

Newshoggers’ pal Tehranchick writes in an email published with her kind permission:

. . . Throwing a few crumbs in their (Palestinians) direction isn’t going to help when we know that the Israeli government can just as easily stop with the crumbs. I see this issue of ‘easing’ as nothing more than concession and appeasement after murderous attack on the flotilla. So please, convince me that Palestinians are going to get real help from ‘the easing.’ Convince me that Netanyahu is serious about change.

The devil will be in the details, such as the list of allowed goods Israel still has to publish and the character and length of the border procedures for people and goods moving in and out.

To be honest, I think it will take more than one. But I also think that the Gaza Flotilla episode has undermined something crucial in the united-we-stand wall that the US and Israeli have presented to the world. … Thus, although it sticks in my craw to countenance a lack of legal accountability for the Flotilla assault, I’ll reluctantly take the product, if that leads to a wall being tore down, instead.

Finally, Abu Aardvaark himself tweeted:

To all: I’m skeptical about implementation of new Gaza rules too, but still think it’s better to take positive move and work with it.

Do Focal Points readers stand in agreement with Steve Hynd and Marc-Abu Ardvark-Lynch?

I believe it was Amiri Baraka who once said, “one man’s fast is another man’s slow.” The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has destroyed a way of life for many American fishermen. This should be accepted as fact not fiction. The landscape of our nation is going to change soon and not for the better. The recent oil spill is not an aberration. Just look at the story in TheNew York Times (June 16, 2010) about the awful conditions in the Niger Delta. It’s obvious we need the media to expand its coverage of oil spills. How soon will toxic wastelands become a normal sight for Americans, the way it is for some Nigerians? It’s unfortunate that Africa is still a “dark continent” when it comes to shedding light on the operations of the oil industry. When I read the following in the newspaper, I wanted to weep:

Big oil spills are no longer news in this vast, tropical land. The Niger Delta — where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface — has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates. The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless.

BP is talking about cleaning up the mess they made. But what does clean-up really mean? Is it no visible oil on the surface of the water? How can life survive after being embraced by oil? What fish or birds would ever want to make love?

In the Niger Delta the villain is Shell. Oil leaks in the region are also a result of oil thieves and aging pipelines, no longer properly being maintained. The people in the Niger Delta have been battling for years to control their destiny and protect their environment.

One wonders what will happen here in the United States? Will a populist movement organize against a big oil company? Will the “small” people fight back?

It might be a good idea to bring Nigerian fishermen and folks from Louisiana to Washington and have them sit side by side and tell their stories. There is a similar (if not singular) narrative taking place and it is beginning to sound too much like science-fiction.

Nearly 200 protesters gathered in front of the White House on the afternoon of June 14 to denounce continued U.S. support for Ethiopia’s incumbent regime. Chanting in native Amharic and rallying around the Ethiopian flag, the crowd members were predominantly from DC’s sizable Ethiopian diaspora.

On May 23, Ethiopia held its fourth national election since transitioning to democracy in 1993. The transition away from dictatorship seems incomplete, however, when all four election have reelected President Meles Zenawi and his monolithic EPRDF party by landslide majorities. This year’s officially reported win margin was 99.6% vote for Zenawi, representing the government’s repression of opposition, use of voter intimidation, and rejection of election monitors. This is a significant regression in democratic governance since the last election Ethiopia held in 2005.

The protesters reacted strongly to this regression, calling on the U.S. to change its foreign policy and aid practices, which currently help prop up Zenawi’s regime. Ethiopia receives the third largest amount of foreign aid from the U.S. after Israel and Egypt, receiving $862 million in foreign assistance in 2009. This inundation of aid and diplomatic silence by the U.S. is projected to be because Ethiopia is such valuable U.S. ally in the volatile horn of Africa and in the War on Terror.

But Ethiopians, both in the Horn of Africa and in the U.S. diaspora, are enraged that the U.S. is prioritizing the stability and anti-terrorism policies of their corrupt despot, Zenawi, over encouraging free and fair elections.

The State Department’s assistant press secretary has remained markedly vague and diplomatic, promising, “We will work diligently with Ethiopia to ensure that strengthened democratic institutions and open political dialogue become a reality for the Ethiopian people.”

A weekly featured poem of provocation and witness. You can find more poetry and arts news from Blog This Rock.

That Pomegranate Shine

Two brides arise from the river, shivering and shining like pomegranate seeds.– Words from an Armenian Song

I was the wrong kind of bride,more sweat than glisten,more peach than pomegranate. At twenty-three, in love with marriage, not the man, I plunged into rough water, bringing grandmother’s candlesticks, mother’s books and two silver trays. Ten years later, I emerged shivering, dragging my ragged volumes, one candlestick and two babies. On the bank, I shook off the water and breathed. Standing with my children, looking out over the river, the new brides asked me where I got that pomegranate shine.

First, we could start by abandoning this ridiculous, self-indulgent ideological debate over the taxonomy of honour killings. Those on the left who abhor the term are right about one thing: A good few of the people who constantly shout it from the rooftops are mostly interested in demonizing Islam. But that doesn’t change the fact that honour killings can . . . rather easily be distinguished from other cases of domestic violence. A murderer who kills a relative in certainty that his peers will approve is a very different animal from one who does so out of anti-social, purely secular rage.

Between 1998 and 2007 . . . 65 Canadian children between the ages of 12 and 17 were killed by a family member. One of them was Aqsa Parvez. … Muhammad Parvez felt humiliated by his daughter’s dress, her behaviour and her choice of friends, and his remedy was to choke the life out of her. “My community will say you have not been able to control your daughter,” he lamented to his wife.

If honour killings are on the rise in Canada. … it’s not as if this is a leading cause of death in Canada, or even of domestic homicide. … The question is not whether this is a problem for the diaspora communities in question, and for Canada. It is. The question is whether it demands sweeping, perhaps structural, changes to Canadian society — for example, “the immigration debate we don’t want to have,” as a Globe and Mail headline darkly intoned yesterday. I don’t think it does. I think it just means we need to try harder.

For example . . .

An unapologetic, incessant message to women and girls living in abusive situations that they don’t have to, and should not, put up with it, backed up with well-funded resources like safe houses and punitive criminal sanctions for offenders.

Asking “What’s the alternative?” Selley concludes:

In a highly theoretical world, we could ban immigration from countries or communities where honour crimes are common. That’s obviously not going to happen. And if it did, we’d be denying people like Aqsa Parvez even the chance to be Canadian. [He] came to Canada as a refugee, not as an immigrant. … Canada granted him asylum from persecution . . . and he repaid the favour by persecuting his daughter for wanting to be free. Because of this cretin, we should turn the country upside down? No thanks.

Do Focal Points readers agree that honor killings can easily be distinguished from other cases of domestic violence? Do you agree with the author that all of us in North America need to guard against over-reacting to honor killings?

His brother said: “He’s not crazy. He’s not a psychopath. He’s not a sociopath. He’s a man on a mission.” His sister described him as a “very patriotic,” man who “had grown frustrated with the public debate over [our] two major wars [as] the main cause had been forgotten [which was that] a man ordered a hit on our country, so we went to war.”

An ailing, middle-age construction worker from Colorado [who] armed himself with a dagger, a pistol, a sword, Christian texts, hashish and night-vision goggles and headed to the lawless tribal areas near the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan to personally hunt down Osama bin Laden.

First question for Focal Points readers: Is this vigilante, however much he may be tilting at the windmill of a possibly dead bin Laden, deserving of any admiration whatsoever? Flipping this around, personally I’ve long been somewhat embarrassed by how little interest most Americans have ever shown in tracking bin Laden & co. down. It’s also rendered inexplicable by how we as a nation gorge ourselves on vengeance-based entertainment.

Let’s examine the forces that are ostensibly strong enough to make us jettison the impulse to vengeance.

1. We’re too busy. Living in the most overworked developed nation, we scarcely have the time, even if inclined, to chew over how we were wronged as others in the developed world might, or stew over it like the underemployed of developing nations.

2. Vengeance is so primitive. To many on the East Coast, anger and vengeance are akin to fire and brimstone, that is, the Red states. It’s aggravated by therapy-nation’s credo that anger is not about how we deal with what provoked us, but how we handle the feeling itself. While recent polls [at the time] show Americans favor restrictions of Muslims’ civil liberties, in Manhattan no one turns a head at Arab music issuing from a Middle-Eastern, sidewalk-food-vendor’s boombox. Unfortunately, this comes off less as a commendable reluctance to profile than, once again, an inability to feel and express anger.

3. We’re not actually angry. Many Americans dwelling in points distant from the attacks felt unaffected by 9/11. Others, though it’s seldom spoken of in polite company, we’re secretly glad that New York and Washington were struck. Despite their disdain for the Islamic religion, they weren’t above feeling grateful to its most extreme representatives for wreaking havoc on their biggest enemy: big government and liberals.

4. We ain’t got no quarrel with them Arabs (no disrespect to Muhammad Ali intended). The conventional wisdom on why President Bush was reelected was summed up by Jeff Jacoby in a Boston Globe column: “Americans trust Bush’s judgment on the overriding issue of our time: the West’s life-and-death struggle against Islamist fanaticism. . . he got the core meaning of 9/11 right.” If that’s true, it’s only because the administration sensed, perhaps because of their own pet Saudis, that Middle-Americans had no innate antipathy toward Middle-Easterners. Thus, the string of terror alerts that the administration issued during the election year [2004] may, in part, have been a means of jolting Middle America into upgrading Middle-Easterners to their “A” list of hatred along with gays, Mexicans, and the aforementioned liberals.

5. Bin Laden is not enough. Half of those polled by Zogby International in New York City on the eve of the [2004] Republican National Convention agreed that the administration had foreknowledge of the attacks. While that may be chalked up to fashionable urban cynicism, more and more Americans suspect the administration either commissioned or was complicit in 9/11.

Second question: Granted — 9/11 was a form of blowback. Nor am I personally calling for revenge. My concern is what does our continued nonchalance about bringing back the head of bin Laden say about the mood of our country?